Ether One is a first person adventure that deals with the fragility of the human mind. There are two paths in the world you can choose from. At it’s core is a story exploration path free from puzzles where you can unfold the story at your own pace.

Recommended By Curators

Reviews

“The world of Ether One is a superbly detailed and well thought-out place.”
4/5 – Joystiq

“It’s been just two days since I last player Ether One and I’ve not stopped thinking about it since. I thought about it before I went to bed last night, and the night before. I thought about it when I woke up this morning. I thought about it when I had lunch. So far I’ve sunk 12 hours into a game easily completable in four. I’ve not nearly managed to restore all of the projectors. And I've hardly scratched the surface.”
9/10 – Strategy Informer

“Superb: A hallmark of excellence. There may be flaws, but they are negligible and won't cause massive damage to what is a supreme title.”
9/10 – Destructoid

About This Game

Ether One is a first person adventure that deals with the fragility of the human mind.

There are two paths in the world you can choose from. At its core is a story exploration path free from puzzles where you can unfold the story at your own pace.

There is also a deeper, more adventurous path in which you can complete complex puzzles to restore life changing events of the patients history in order to help the validation of their life.

Parallel paths make Ether One accessible to a range of skilled players. Invite your friends and family around to pick their brains for help taking on challenging environmental puzzles, or soak in the atmosphere of Pinwheel at leisure. From a young age we enjoyed the first person puzzle games that required you to write cryptic notes on spare pieces of paper to unravel mysteries. Ether One aims to bring back pen and paper puzzle solving, whilst still being accessible and optional for people not wanting to get stuck and frustrated on the harder puzzles.

features

First Person Adventure Game.

Open narrative exploration in the town of Pinwheel.

Optional puzzle solving.

Accessible gameplay with additional controller support for players that aren’t as skilled with complex controls.

Challenging pen and paper puzzle design you can decrypt at your own pace.

Deluxe Edition

The Ether One Deluxe Edition comes with the Ether One OST, Game Script, & Comics along with a few more goodies. Please note that there is no additional in-game content.

The Ether One Original Soundtrack by Nathaniel-Jorden Apostol features more than 40 minutes of music created exclusively for Ether One. The soundtrack comes with MP3 & FLAC format along with custom artwork for the soundtrack.

MP3 & FLAC format files will be placed in the Ether One folder in the Steam Directory: ...Steam\steamapps\common\EtherOne\Soundtrack

The Ether One game scripts contain all of the spoken dialogue along with some things that got cut from the game. We hope you find it interesting to see how we developed the narrative for Ether One. Please note: These scripts contain spoilers for the game. You may wish to finish Ether One before reading these. We have noted down specifically which game script contain spoilers in the download.

PDF format files will be placed in the Ether One folder in the Steam Directory: ...Steam\steamapps\common\EtherOne\Scripts

The Strange Tale of Byron Spencer was created by Mark Penman & coloured by Andrew Tunney. It provides an alternative fiction for the world of Pinwheel.

PDF format files will be placed in the Ether One folder in the Steam Directory: ...Steam\steamapps\common\EtherOne\Comics

While I appreciate the originality of the idea and theme, the execution of the gameplay falls flat. Simply put, it's boring. And when it's not boring, it's just frustrating, two qualities that will ruin a game every time. Why do I play games? For fun. This game misses that mark by a longshot. The voice acting is good. There is not much else I can say that is positive.

Despite the use of Unreal Engine, the rendering is cartoonish, stylized and outlined as if it were hand drawn. I understand if this was a creative decision, but it's a shameful waste of Unreal Engine's potential. Texture resolution is extremely low, even on max settings. Regardless of this, performance is not great, indicating shoddy construction and poor use of the engine's resources.

It is never clear what can be interacted with and what can't be, and the interact mechanic often doesn't work, so you end up clicking on something multiple times before discovering if it's static or not. Solutions to puzzles are arbitrary, counter-intuitive and make no contextual sense, so that it becomes a random guessing game with a lot of back and forth expirementing. It has that old-school Hidden Object Game feel to it, where you end up trying every possible combination with everything in your inventory. Except you don't have an inventory. You can only carry one item.

If the point of the game was to get you to feel the frustration of memory loss and dementia, then it succeeds. It could have more appropriately expressed itself with logic and memory puzzles. The mind is a use-it-or-lose-it faculty, so a game designed to exercise it, while addressing the issue in the story, may have been the admirable goal of the developers. They over-reached, and fell miserably short.

Worst of all, achievements that I earned did not unlock for me. That was the final straw that prompted me to write my first ever Not Recommended review. For the price, there are many more far superior games to choose from.

This will go down as one of the best games I have ever played. Everything about it, from the great voice acting, to the nuanced story-telling, to the stunning world building. The feeling I had upon completion of this game was not unlike finishing a beloved novel. Once I am done I enter a period of post story depression, wherein I am sad the world I had been living in is now over. That is exactly how I felt after completing EO. I wish I could take my memory away of this game and play it again for the first time so that I could have the same feelings of awe and wonderment. The feelings I had were not unlike playing/completing the amazing games I played as a youth.

To point, I highly recommend this game to ANY player. With one caveat. Know that the game you're about to play has a set pace, is not an action game, requires remembering details and difficult puzzle solving, and maybe 30% of the incredible story telling comes from notes/newspapers/items/ect. you must find YOURSELF in the world of the game. This game requires and deserves your time and attention. Also, like a good book, the story and answers to questions are not all handed to you in a gift wrapped box at the end. You, like the developers trained you throughout the game, must use the pieces to solve the puzzle that is EO. If any of this sounds like the worst way to play a game, then wait until you do feel like something thought provoking. Like many pieces of great art/entertainment you need to be in the right mood. If I had just finished playing something like Call of Duty and then tried to play this game, I might not have enjoyed it as much. So wait for yourself to be in the mood for this game, that way you give yourself the best opportunity to enjoy it.

Pros +Voice acting(waaaay above average)+Graphics (it has a style, and does it well)+World Building (I don't know if the town the game is set in exists, but god did it feel like a real place with a real history)+Story-Telling (There is a deliberate pace to the story-telling, and its executed superbly)+Game Play (Again it requires reading and collecting, both things I already do in any game that allows me. But it is an adventure exploration game, so there is a lot of reading/collecting)+Ending (without revealing too much, there are two endings. Both are great, but the second one, which I stumbled on accidently, left me without words and nearly in tears)+Puzzle-Solving (to say the puzzles in EO are difficult is an understatement. I had to consult a guide on a number of them. Luckily I found a guide on the steam forums that gave three hints before giving the solution so I felt like I was cheating less)

Cons+ bugs (this game has them, every game has them. Luckily the ones I encountered in no way effected my gameplay)+ length (I wish it were longer. I don't feel cheated in any way, but like all good things, I just wanted more)\

Bottom line - You should play this game, just play it when you’re in the mood for it.

There are many positives with this game, the graphics, overarching story, voice acting, are some of them. The developer has worked hard. However, there is one BUT and for those who, like me, want to chose this game for the opportunity to do puzzles then this BUT is HUGE. The large majority of the puzzles are solved by performing totally random actions. Other reviewers has used the term 'counterintuitive', which sounds like you need to think outside of the box here. This is not the case, most puzzles are just random, which can work in small games where you have a screen or two and just few items in the inventory. Here the map is huge and having to go back and for continously and interact with everything with no clue of what you are looking for or trying to achieve is exhausting and frustrating. In my case I also had a couple of bugs, which meant I had to lose +2hours of game to back to an earlier save to be able to proceed. It was luck I still have that save as you can only keep three saves. I am sorry, but I wouldn't recommend it.

In this game, you play as a professional puzzle solver, who has travelled to a curious village to help a bunch of helpless villagers who have all conveniently lost the fourth slider wheel from their combination safes, broken all of their projectors, and rearranged their homes and workplaces into Myst-like puzzles. The game does a good job of capturing that classic Myst feeling of wandering around an expansive puzzle-filled area for 20 minutes, flipping a lever to test it out, flipping it back after wondering whether or not you were actually supposed to flip it yet or not, and then exploring for 20 more minutes until everything finally starts to come together.

The only problem is the strange inventory system, in which instead of having a typical inventory system, you can only carry one item at a time, and have to warp back to your "Case" (which acts as a hub between the different maps) and place items on the various shelves in the main room to store them. It's not as inconvenient as it sounds since the transition between the map and the case is mostly seamless and the shelves are right beside where you arrive in the Case, but it's also somewhat glitchy - at one point early on, one of the safe wheels found in the Case itself vanished after I put it on a shelf and went back to the map, and it never came back. It was presumably a spare wheel since I was able to fully complete the game without it, but if it were to happen to someone else to a more important item it could be game-breaking. But the inventory system also lends towards the "fun confusion" factor of the game, because since a somewhat large amount of items can be picked up and stored in the game you're never as sure whether you need to use a particular item as you would be in a game where you only had three items in your inventory. This was particularly relevant in my case, since on two separate occasions the instructor gave me a friendly reminder that I could store items after picking up an item, and in both cases, that item was a bottle of alchohol. This led me to believe that the bottles might end up somehow being important, and it wasn't until the credits began to roll that I realized that there was no great alcohol puzzle, and I didn't actually need a shelf full of 30 bottles of the village's finest cider for anything other than a good time.

Overall, if you like puzzle games, especially exploration-based ones, this is a pretty easy recommendation. The story is great, and the puzzles are challenging. It's worth noting that while almost all of the real puzzles are optional and completing them only fleshes out the backstory, you won't really get a good experience if you just wander around collecting the ribbons that are the only thing completely necessary to finish the game, but if you're looking for a reasonably challenging puzzle game then this is a great choice.

You don't need to go into Pinwheel Village’s blacksmith forge and learn how, during the patient’s youth, blacksmithing within the village began to stray from indispensable function to obsolescence. Or how the smith slipped quietly into depression as he watched his chosen trade slowly die. You learn this if you do explore, though, from the narration offered by the doctor as well as from a voice more directly linked to the memories. One approach offers facts and the other insight, talking about how heartbreaking it was to see the smith retreat into himself over the years, despite still being able to produce items of immense beauty that he would sell to try and eke out a living. The tale of the smith is largely irrelevant to Ether One’s plot, but it’s absolutely vital to the world the game attempts to build.